Global Cooling? A Remembrance

What is important to take from this article about the global cooling scare in the 1970’s, is that leaders will often misrepresent reality to satisfy their agendas—which I’m sure is not news to anyone—in complete contradiction to the social teaching of the Church applying to the integrity of leaders whose charge is to protect the citizens in their care and treat them with dignity, not lie to them.

In all too many cases, and we rarely discover the truth until after the fact, statistics and assumptions are presented to persuade us to do something, usually with our money, and it is good to remember the history of these pleas, usually transmitted as end-of-the-world warnings, is that most of them were untrue, as this article does.

An excerpt.

“A corollary of Murphy's Law ("If something can go wrong, it will") is: "Things are worse than they can possibly be." Energy Secretary Steven Chu, an atomic physicist, seems to embrace that corollary but ignores Gregg Easterbrook's "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong.

“Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California's snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean "no more agriculture in California," the nation's leading food producer. "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going."

“No more lettuce or Los Angeles? Chu likes predictions, so here is another: Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen. Global cooling recently joined that lengthening list.

“In the 1970s, "a major cooling of the planet" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well-established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950" (New York Times, May 21, 1975).

“Although some disputed that the "cooling trend" could result in "a return to another ice age" (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975; and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively).

“The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975).

"The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of "ominous signs" that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down," meteorologists were "almost unanimous" that "the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975).